a website with words and pictures

Most Fridays I work from home. Today was no different, and I decided to wear the Wild sweater that my mother in law (who is retiring! woo!) gave me as it is large and comfortable (much like myself?). Hadn’t really worn it before, so when Iver saw me he exclaimed, “Dada! That’s a funny shirt!” And I guess he’s right, it is rather distinct from my normal white v-neck undershirt and sweatpants. Later in the day I gave him a bath due to a heinous nap-time crap and after we enjoyed some Mister Rogers in our matching white undershirts.

Last night was the mother-in-law’s retirement party at the Lookout, where they have a little playground. His adoring cousins were kind enough to load him into the baby swing which he proudly named the Underpants Swing. Genius!

One of the things we let him watch on the tubes is the Bible Project videos. His favorite:

This morning he told us he “made the Gospel of Mark” which turned out to be a yoga mat rolled up like a scroll with various items lovingly placed upon it.

Today he spent a couple hours at a friend of ours while Catie printed our church’sliturgy handout thing. He was presented with a newfound love: chocolate pudding. He came home exclaiming his love for “lick chocolate” which is forever what I’m calling it now.

He actually fell asleep during his nap today, which means it’s now 10pm and he’s still banging around up there. Oh well.

“Terrible and Sad,” said Pooh, “because Eeyore, who is a friend of mine, has lost his tail. And he’s Moping about it. So could you very kindly tell me how to find it for him?”

“Well,” said Owl, “the customary procedure in such cases is as follows.”

“What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?” said Pooh. “For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.”

Iver has been laser focused on this particular chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh (Chapter IV, In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One). Repetition is not something I cherish in bedtime stories, but I know it’s huge for kids and he laughs at Crustimoney Proceedcake every time we read it.

I had a particularly lengthy off-hours stint of work on Saturday, so I decided to take today off to make up for it. Iver found a pamphlet somewhere yesterday extolling the virtues of Minneapolis. Included in the pamphlet were some pictures of water fountains, so he’s been talking non-stop about going to visit one. Being mid-April in Minnesota, of course none of the fountains around here are operational. But I wasn’t 100% sure, and thought it would be a fun diversion, so we got in the car and headed out to find a fountain.

Tonight Iver and I read Chapter II of Winnie-the-Pooh, in which Pooh gets stuck in Rabbit’s front door after eating all the honey and condensed milk Rabbit had on hand. While Christopher Robin is explaining to Pooh that he will remain stuck in the hole for a whole week, Pooh asks if someone would please read to him from a Sustaining Book:

“A week!” said Pooh gloomily. “What about meals?”

“I’m afraid no meals,” said Christopher Robin, “because of getting thin quicker. But we will read to you.”

Bear began to sigh, and then found he couldn’t because he was so tightly stuck; and a tear rolled down his eye, as he said:

“Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?”

There’s a lot going on in our world. Reading the news about the refugee crisis or the opioid epidemic makes me glad we get to read this Sustaining Book together over and over again.

When Catie was young she was given a stuffed bear from Dayton’s. It came with a backpack and hiking gear and was named Boundary Waters Bear. He’s well loved, to the point where we searched eBay for his brethren and have so far acquired three more of them (if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing?). Iver has had a couple of them in his room since birth, and this morning he announced that they were now named Pooh and Christopher Robin. Catie put some Identifying Socks on them and they are now joining us at most meals. From the sound of it a great many adventures were had with them throughout the day. Here they are eating breakfast:

I don’t really have a point to make here, other than I love my kid and Winnie-the-Pooh is a Sustaining Book when you feel like you are a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness.

I’m a baseball fan in general, and a fan of the Minnesota Twins in particular. It was not always thus. I grew up with generic notions of local sport team fandom as most children in a city with (usually) four major sports teams probably do, with the most fondness for the Twins. This was likely due to being 5 and 9 years old when they won their two World Series’. Baseball is the sort of game that’s easy enough for a young child to understand on the surface, and I have very fond memories watching those ’87 and ’91 teams make their championship run.

Usually when I think about the spacetime in which we occupy in relation to the advancement of technology, it’s a negative thing. Why don’t we have flying cars? Why haven’t we bred trees that don’t shed leaves in the fall that have to be raked? Can’t we make emo grass (that cuts itself)? Etc. But. No more. You can buy a WiFi enabled MCU for about nine (9) USD on Amazon, including one day shipping (if you’re a Prime member and spend enough and live in certain areas probably). The possibilities are endless.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of returning to the Best Buy HQ campus for Minnebar12. I’ve been to many and continue to be impressed that an event that large continues to be free, well attended, and full of pretty decent content. For my first session I chose to attend @eryno’s talk on being a lead developer. She breaks down the lead’s role into three categories: Facilitate, Advocate and Motivate.

To illustrate what a good facilitator does, she told a story about her brother in law giving her a pretzel. After starting to eat it, she realized it was salty and would require some water – so she went to go ask for some but there was her brother in law with water in hand who said “duh, pretzels are salty.” The point being, try to anticipate roadblocks and get them out of the way before they happen if you can.

Advocating is basically the art of saying no, but having evidence to back you up so an actual negotiation can take place rather than a battle of emotions. One of the things people often ask me is “can we just do X” and my typical reaction is something like “anything is possible with enough time and money!” Which is my way of letting them know that yes, we can probably do that, but something else that you also think is important won’t get done when you thought it would.

She had some good perspective on motivation as well – starting with the notion that no one is going to be more optimistic about the feasibility of a project than you are, so make sure you’re presenting a positive attitude to your team.

I also attended Andrew Rahn’s talk about the mini yarn skein winding robot he made for his wife, which was a lot of fun. I’ve recently started trying my hand at some electronics stuff, but nothing with stepper motors or even a proper case yet, so I learned a couple things.

Another session I enjoyed was an intro to Kotlin, a newish JVM language that is type safe and heavily influenced by functional programming. Looks very interesting, and I’m definitely hoping to try it out on something soon.

Also attended sessions on reactive functional programming as well as one on genetic algorithms, so as to cover 2016 and 2004 buzzwords adequately.

As always the food was great, got to see old friends, and I got a new T-shirt.

As previously mentioned, I’ve been reading stories to Iver from The House at Pooh Corner, but I confess that I haven’t actually read him the first book. I have this set:

so we’ve been reading the orange one, but I keep telling him that we really should be reading the pink one. I read them to Catie when she was pregnant and at some point misplaced the pink one, but today it was found. Apparently when we went through all our books last fall it ended up in our general library, not back in its proper Pooh box. Oh bother.

Oh and yes, after many, many years of not blogging I have returned. I first started a blog, if you can call it that, back in college. It was full of nonsense and poorly homemade out of some perl CGI scripts, so as life filled up with competing demands I abandoned it some years back. Now that Iver is old enough to be fairly interactive I was once again looking for a place to record and share longer form stories about our lives, and while Facebook is great for admiring pictures of your friends’ kids and Twitter is a great place to chuckle at snark, there’s something unique about the humble independent weblog that I missed. I also started doing some hobby electronics stuff and want to post a record of those projects in case they were useful to anyone else.

So: basics. We are three-and-a-dog. I make software during the day. The wife is Catie and maybe she’ll post occasionally. She works part time at our church Genesis Covenant. The child is Iver and he is three and a half. He will go to preschool in the fall. The dog is called Stella and she came to be with us via the Second Chance Rescue as one of a litter of pups found on the Standing Rock reservation. She’s some kind of Shepherd mix and enjoys a couple days a week at the local doggy day care Mutt Nuts. She’s about 6 months old. We’ve had her since she was 12 weeks and she’s a wonderful addition to our home.

I’ve been reading stories from The House at Pooh Cornerto Iver every night, and if you’ve read it you might remember the Purposeful Misspellings and abundant Capitalizations of Nouns. He’s three-and-a-half, so who knows how much of the plot is sinking in, but he seems to enjoy it. I sure do.